11.8.2015 
Colleen Hoover: New York Calling

When Colleen Hoover self-published her first book, Slammed, she was living in a single-wide trailer house in Sulphur Springs, Texas, with her husband and three children, making nine dollars an hour. She had to unplug the microwave to use the air conditioning. She was thirty-two. Then her book hit the New York Times bestseller list in July 2012 and continued to climb the list, ultimately peaking at #8. She signed a book deal with Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, and moved into her first house at the end of that year. Now thirty-five, Colleen has eleven New York Times bestsellers under her belt (including two additional self-published novels).

This week she goes on book tour in Texas for her latest, November 9,and she talked with LSLL via email about writing, reading, and how it feels to be a Cinderella story of publishing.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Did you always like to write stories, Colleen? How did you decide to write a book for your mother for a gift which got this whole incredible experience rolling?

COLLEEN HOOVER: I have always loved to write. I wrote in school any chance I could get and would write short stories for my mother. Once I graduated high school, I got married and had three kids while working and going to college full-time. I went probably ten straight years without writing for fun. When I was thirty-one, I started writing a story and found my passion again. Of course, not having any professional experience in writing, I simply looked at is as a hobby. I didn’t try to get published. I just wanted to finish before Christmas because I was very poor and it was something I could give my mother for free that she would love. Little did I know what it would turn into!

What was it like growing up in Hopkins County — a county of about 20,000 people — in East Texas? How did your roots influence the writer you became?

I absolutely loved growing up here. A lot of people can’t wait to graduate high school so they can leave their hometown and go experience new things. I was never like that. I love the small-town vibe, and having family close has always been important to me. A lot of people have to move away to a larger city in order to be successful, but luckily my career doesn’t revolve around where I live. I can write anywhere.

It seems like you single-handedly invented the New Adult genre. How would describe the genre, and are there other authors who write NA whom you’d recommend?

If I had anything to do with it, I promise you it was completely unintentional. I didn’t even know I had written a romance novel because before writing Slammed, I had never a romance. I’m pretty sure I was about three books into my career before I heard the term “New Adult.” I came across it on a Wikipedia page and saw that I was listed as one of the first to write in that genre.

Basically, New Adult is a category that revolves around characters in their formative years, experiencing life on their own as adults for the first time. New Adult has sort of gotten a stigma for being YA with a lot of explicit sex, but to me that’s not it at all. The majority of my books don’t even have sex in them, so it’s not necessary for a book to be considered New Adult.

There are a lot of great NA authors out there. Tammara Webber, Sarina Bowen, Elle Kennedy, Katja Millay, Jessica Park, Tina Reber, Jamie McGuire, Abbi Glines. I could go on and on.

What was the turning point with your first book?

For me, the turning point was just finishing it. I have been more proud of the moment I wrote “The End” than anything that has happened beyond that. I do believe it became successful because I released at a good time, before the market was saturated. I had a run of good luck, unwittingly writing and releasing in a genre that was about to take off. I had some wonderful readers who loved the book [Slammed] so much, they talked about it online and to their friends. Word of mouth was probably the most effective aspect for sales of the book, and I believe word of mouth is still the most successful marketing tool available for a book.

What is it about your stories that creates such a connection with your readers?

I honestly have no idea, but I’ve tried my best to figure it out. I am a very ADD reader myself, which means I have an extremely short attention span when I read. In fact, I would get so bored reading books with detailed description that (if the book was also a movie) I would go and search out the screenplays and only read the screenplay. This is probably a key factor in the way that I write, because description and excessive detail bore me as a reader, so it’s a not a writing technique I use an author. A lot of writers are writing to impress — maybe publishers, maybe other writers — so they may go out of their way to use a large vocabulary and craft a substantial piece of literature. That’s not how I write. I want people to devour my books in one sitting because the storyline and dialogue are too gripping to put down. I don’t try to write heavy books that educate, inform, and impress. My only goal is to entertain, and hopefully that’s what I’m doing.

I love the post on your website in which you talk about living in a trailer, not having much money, but being very happy being with your family and your life. Now that you have eleven New York Times bestsellers under your belt in three years, how has it changed your life?

My life has changed in so many ways, yet also not at all. We simply built a new house on the land where our single-wide trailer sat. We have a bigger house and more room to move around, and we aren’t living paycheck to paycheck anymore, but our family dynamic is still the same. We’re still very happy and I try my best to keep things as normal as possible for my children. Sometimes I complain out loud that I don’t have enough money to pay the light bill just so they won’t think life is any different than it used to be. I do travel a lot more, but considering I used to work eleven-hour days at my old job, I feel like I’m with them more often.

I think my goal is to not let it change me. I was very happy before and I’m very happy now, and if I ever feel like the stress or the work demand is getting to be too much, I would easily walk away from it all. Family always has been and always will be the most important thing.

I’ve read in interviews that your sisters were very active early on in the marketing of your books. What sorts of things did they do?

They promoted the book on Facebook and asked all their friends to read it. They were very happy and excited, and they had big hopes for me. We actually used to argue about it. At one point after I had finished my first book, my older sister had made a vision board (something she does every January) and wrote on the board that she hoped I would make $100,000 that year. I got so angry at her and made her remove it because I didn’t like that they had such faith in me. I didn’t want to let them down if no one ever bought or read the book.

Once you hit the New York Times bestseller list as a self-published author, you had publishers and agents coming to you. Describe what that was like.

Honestly? I felt like a fraud. It all happened so fast, I felt I hadn’t paid my dues as a writer yet. Here I was, this working mother who wrote a story and now New York was calling? It didn’t make sense to me. I was still working full-time when I started receiving offers from publishers in amounts that I hadn’t made in my entire life of working. I was hesitant to accept any of the offers because I thought my first two books were a fluke and everything was going to stop at any moment. I didn’t want to disappoint a publisher, if that was the case. I ended up selling the two books I had already written to Atria Books, but didn’t sign any future books with them at the time. I didn’t know if I would be able to write under pressure, and the last thing I wanted was to be stressed about something that brought me nothing but joy.

You are thirty-five years old. Do you think you’ll write something besides New Adult as your career evolves?

I don’t even try to write New Adult now, it’s just where the stories have gone. I have ideas for other books and I’m open to anything. I’m sure as I evolve as a person and writer, I might want to go in a different direction, but for now I just take it one book at a time and don’t pay any attention to what’s popular.

What advice would you give aspiring writers?

Try to let go of any expectations you have beyond writing your book. The last thing a writer wants is to be let down by an industry they love. If your only goal is to finish the book, then everything that may come after that is just icing on the cake.

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